Lessons From Observability Leaders Survey

The very first internet’ connection occurred in 1969. Charley Kline typed a short message from his computer at UCLA to Bill Duvall’s computer at Stanford Research Institute, in a scene reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell’s exchange with Thomas Watson nearly 100 years before. He got two characters in (the “L” and “O” of “login”) before the system crashed, causing the world’s first internet outage.

Nearly half a century later, the industry continues to see high-profile digital services outages from major players (like Microsoft®, AWS®, Instagram, and others). Turns out, assuring digital end-to-end services is hard-really hard. This explains why Gartner included “observability” in its famous Hype Cycle in 2022.

The fact is, IT environments are now too complex for humans to manage alone. Observability tools have emerged as a solution for achieving optimal performance, compliance, and resilience in digital environments. In essence, observability provides visibility across your network, infrastructure, systems, application, database, digital experience, and log monitoring-all in one end-to-end solution.

Observability also goes a step beyond monitoring, using cross-domain data correlation, machine learning, and AIOps to provide actionable business insights needed to identify and remediate issues in real time.